This invention is advantageously applied to dispensing medicines, in particular in hospitals, for making up batches of medicines with said batches being made up individually for each patient in a given service, for example, in response to a set of prescriptions made out for each of them. The invention is equally applicable to dispensing small articles in retail centers, shops, or stores or in manufacturing workshops for use with articles such as hardware or electronic components in the form of individual batches made up in response to a plurality of orders from a set of customers or production services.
Numerous devices are already known for dispensing goods in response to orders, in particular pharmaceutical products in dispensaries or in central services which supply dispensaries.
Prior devices of this type have been developed to provide large scale storage of goods, together with automated handling capable of bringing together extracted articles in response to each order. These devices can be controlled by an electronic system which is itself controlled from a console or by a computer having a terminal with a keyboard, and also serving to manage stock availability and reprovisioning where necessary.
Thus, French Pat. No. 71 18429 describes a device for storing and dispensing objects, said device having a plurality of vertical drawers each constituted by a row of vertical compartments.
Each compartment contains a stack of identical objects in the form of boxes or the like. The drawers belong to one or more storage modules. Within each module, the drawers are invididually movable in translation in a direction perpendicular to the compartments in order to position one or other of the compartments in a drawer driven in translation over a conveyor belt belonging to the module. A catch carried by the conveyor belt engages the desired object at the bottom of the stack contained in the compartment via a suitable compartment bottom and serves to extract the object. The object drops onto the conveyor belt and is thus conveyed by that belt alone or by other auxiliary belts as well towards a central recovery point while the drawer is returned to its initial position in the module.
Such known devices relate essentially to the organization of the storage assembly and to the means for automatically extracting each desired object. They process the orders received one after the other.
An aim of the present invention is to provide an installation for making up batches of items packaged individually or in boxes containing a plurality of articles, in response to a set of orders, with the method in which articles are extracted being manual or automatic, and thus being easily adaptable to existing ordinary storage systems, while providing a significant improvement in the services rendered together with a gain in productivity.